AWS Data Centre Goes Down

Amazon Web Services S3 data centre went offline this week affecting around 150,000 websites to various degrees and took several hours to rectify.

Software, from web apps to smartphone applications, relying on this cloud-based storage went into meltdown, taking much of the internet with it. it is generally agreed that spreading your applications over different data centres is a good strategy as outages tend to be regional, so when they occur it doesn’t take your whole platform with it. However, this can be a costly exercise and many developers don’t do this as standard practice.

Campbell Williams, Group Strategy and Marketing Director at Six Degrees Group, reacted to the news and stated below that outages need to be planned for. “Following last night’s news about the AWS S3 data centre fault, it must not be forgotten that AWS is a fantastically resilient service with phenomenally high levels of uptime. Having said that, outages DO happen; cloud platforms will go down, data centres will go offline and networks will break. But it’s all about how you plan for these technology failures, and if your data only exists in one place, then there will always be a risk.

An obvious lesson to be learnt is that organisations need to back up their data…and back up their backup. Companies that want to embrace cloud technology need to bring in the right expertise and do it properly.”